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The other day I was on my walk with a friend and we ran into another. The look on her face was stricken. After the three of us completed a couple of loops around the park, she told us that her son, a college student, was having a rough time socially. After she left, the other friend said: “When I saw her face I thought someone had died.” My friend was in deep pain because her son was. I know in my body what that feels like.

When they fall down, our instinct is to pick them up, kiss the boo boo and make everything all right. We do this when they’re little, at college age, it’s just not so easy. Often it’s not even possible.

About Me:

This blog began as a way to introduce the memoir I was working on, Welcome to My Breakdown. After several years, the book is done and published and available. You can buy it here or clicking on my author tab below.

This is my first non-fiction work. I wrote four best-selling novels: Good Hair; (which is available for the first time as an E-book), The Itch, Acting Out, Who Does She Think She Is? All have been re-issued and can be bought via the same author tab or through my page on the Simon & Schuster website.

My momoir (yeah, I just made it up) is about the grief that surrounded me after my much-loved mother died. It's about me falling off the cliff, from which I'd been dangling, and plunging into a cavern of depression so dark and scary that I didn't think I'd find my way out. The book is about coming out of the kind of depression that the writer David Foster Wallace called a "a nausea of the soul." Some of the stories about my smart, determined, hard-working, hilarious mother, I think, will resonate with many of you who also had formidable moms.

But the blog also about other stuff: Things that inspire, confound and interest me as a writer, a mother, a wife and as a human being. I hope you'll join my community. I look forward to hearing your thoughts.